Woman blinded in notorious crime dies

Lye-in-face case was subject of 'Crazy Love' film

Jan. 25, 2013

Linda Pugach

Written by

Ula Ilnytzky

Associated Press

TOGETHER AGAIN

Linda Pugach was being laid to rest in a crypt in Paramus, N.J. on Thursday. “There’s a place for me there,” said her husband, Burton Pugach. “We’ll be together.”

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NEW YORK — Linda Pugach, who was blinded in 1959 when her lover hired hit men to throw lye in her face — and became a media sensation after later marrying him — has died, her husband said Thursday. She was 75.

The infamous New York City crime was detailed in the 2007 documentary “Crazy Love.”

Pugach, who hid behind dark glasses for the rest of her life, died Tuesday at the Long Island Jewish Hospital in Queens. The cause was heart failure, said her husband, Burton Pugach, who spent 14 years in prison for hiring the thugs to attack his then-girlfriend Linda Riss after she spurned him. He was married at the time, and the heinous attack became an instant tabloid sensation.

After his release, Pugach divorced his first wife and persuaded Riss to marry him in 1974. He proposed to her on live television.

“This was a very fairy tale romance,” a sobbing Pugach said Thursday.

After the release of “Crazy Love,” Pugach praised filmmaker Dan Klores for revealing a story that for the first time “has colors — it was no longer black and white.”

Two decades after his release from prison, Pugach was accused in another case with chilling similarities but acquitted of the charges in 1997. He had been accused of threatening and harassing another lover after she tried to end their five-year affair.

Linda Pugach testified at that trial, describing her husband as a good man. She said he was an adulterer, not a criminal.

Pugach said his wife went into the hospital Dec. 26, 2012, two days before they had scheduled a trip to Florida to buy a property in Boca Raton.